


One Step At a Time

by srmiller



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, Mild Angst, Team Flash, but if you squint snowbarry and westallen are there, in which barry tries to get angsty and his friends don't let him, not really shippy, set after 2x6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-19
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 09:26:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5243159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/srmiller/pseuds/srmiller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After waking up paralyzed Barry has been struggling to get back to normal, but even if he learns how to walk again he's not sure he can put on the suit and run head first in to danger now that he knows what it's like to fail in front of the entire city.</p><p>But thankfully, Barry has a team-has friends-who aren't willing to let him give up that easily.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Step At a Time

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr prompt and unbeta'd

The pain was insurmountable.

His hands braced on the rails Caitlin had set up in a quiet part of the lab. It wasn’t until after a furious and rather loud argument Barry had relented and agreed to physical therapy.

He’d been sitting in the wheelchair (not Wells’, because, no that wasn’t happening) and she’d been trying to convince him to give rehab a try. Twelve hours after he’d been attacked he’d gotten some feeling back in his legs but it was all pinpricks and dull aches and he’d made the mistake of telling Caitlin.

Now she wouldn’t leave him alone.

“I’m never going to run again, so what’s the point!”

“The point is you not giving up!” she shot back. “You’re not allowed to give up.”

“Watch me.”

Something about the ice in his voice, about the solid and unmovable certainty in it had lit a fire in the prim and proper Dr. Caitlin Snow and she’d shoved him.

But since he’d been in a wheelchair he’d slid back a foot or two before he thought to grab the wheel and stop himself and when he looked up at Caitlin she looked neither apologetic nor ashamed.

Her arms were crossed and sparks had all but flown from her eyes.

“Is that what your mom would want? Is that what your dad would want? Or how about Eddie or Ronnie? Do you think they’d give up?”

“They’re dead Caitlin, they don’t care.”

He’d expected her to flinch, had intended the shot to hit her where it hurt her most but instead she’d walked towards him with a cool confidence he’d found a little unnerving and bent down to brace her hands on the armrests of his chair.

“Even dead they’ve got more fight than you do. Right now, they’re more the hero than you ever were.”

Which was how he’d found himself pushing himself to make steps, painful and excruciatingly slow steps, when there had been a time he’d been able to run across water.

“Dude, you know it’s really a shame you heal so fast because chicks dig scars.”

Barry looked over to see Cisco with a bag of peanut M&Ms, leaning against the doorway with a grin on his face. “I mean, if you can’t tell a hot girl you’re a superhero you should at least be able to show her cool scars.”

“No one’s going to believe I got in a bar fight.”

“You can rescue babies and old ladies,” Cisco suggested with a shrug.

Barry huffed out a laugh as he stepped forward, the white noise in his feet reminded him of when trying to walk when his foot was waking up. Only multiply the pain by a hundred thousand or so.

“It hurts.”

He barely managed a nod between steps but Barry could see Cisco getting closer out of the corner of his eyes.

“Caitlin’s still working on a pain killer you won’t metabolize in an instant.”

Barry nodded and managed another step but he could feel his arms getting weak, the sweat trickling down his back as he labored with each movement.

“But hopefully you won’t even need man, I mean you’re the flash, you healed from a broken in less than a day. At this rate you should be up and running faster than the speed of light soon.”

“I don’t know about that Cisco,” Barry admitted as he reached for his chair and sagged gratefully into the seat.

“But I thought-Caitlin said you were all healed up, it was just matter of getting better.”

“I don’t know if I can put on the suit again. I don’t know if I can be the Flash.”

“Well, that’s stupid.”

Looking up at the flippant tone of voice Barry released the break on his chair. “Excuse me?”

“You don’t be the Flash,” Cisco informed him as he held out of his bag of candy. “You are the flash. That would be like me saying I don’t want to a brilliant science god. I just _am._ ”

Barry couldn’t help but smile as he took a handful of M&Ms from Cisco. “Maybe I’m just as confidant as you are.”

“Well, duh. But you’d kind of be an idiot if you were. I mean, dude, you got your ass thoroughly kicked so if you were all ‘let’s get back to it’ right out of the gate I’d be a little worried about your sanity.”

“So you think I’m right.”

“No.”

“If you want to continue this conversation Cisco, you’re going to have to start making sense.”

“I am making sense, you just got your brain scrambled by an evil elf.”

Cisco sighed and leaned against the railing, looking down to meet Barry’s eyes. “Look, all I’m saying is no one can blame you for being a little gun shy. You’ve never been hurt like that, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Caitlin that worried before, and it’s going to take a while to get better and even longer to find your rhythm but you can’t walk away just because you got knocked down.”

“I got more than knocked down Cisco.”

“I know,” and he sounded so sincere and empathetic Barry thought he really did understand. “And getting knocked down that hard means it’s going to take longer to get back up but you can’t let Zoom win. You can’t stay down.”

“The idea of facing him again terrifies me.”

“Good. That means next time you’ll be careful, you’ll be smarter, and if nothing else we know more about Zoom now than we ever did before. Starting with the fact he’s an Ork.”

“I thought he was an Elf.”

“He’s a hybrid,” Cisco decided and Barry felt the urge to laugh for the first time in days. “And I know there’s some stuff you got to do by yourself, but just try to keep in mind you’re not alone in this.”

“Thanks, man.”

Cisco held up his fist and Barry smiled as he bumped his against it.

“And by the way, Iris is here. She’s in the command and control room.”

“Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, tossing an M&M in the air and catching it with his mouth. “I’m trying out a few things. I’m headed to my lab if anyone starts looking for me.”

Barry pushed himself across the floor and down the hall, finally making his way in to the heart of their operation and saw Iris sitting in one of the chairs at the console checking something on her phone.

“Anything interesting?”

She looked up and gave him a half-hearted smile, “You could say that.”

“What’s up?”

Iris waited until he’d rolled closer before handing him her phone.

“Is this your old Flash blog?”

“I can’t believe you let me talk to you about you for months. You’re biggest egomaniac I’ve ever met.”

He caught the teasing in her voice and shrugged, “I wasn’t about to kill the only good publicity I had. I didn’t realize you kept up the blog.”

“I didn’t. Once I became an official, real reporter I dropped it but someone e-mailed me a couple months ago asking if they could take it over. I wasn’t doing anything with it so I figured why not? I check in every once in a while, for nostalgia I guess.”

“The Flash Injured,” Barry read and realized it was a quick and dirty recap of what had happened to him with Zoom. “I don’t want to read this Iris.”

“Skip the entry, that’s not what I wanted to show you anyway.”

“Then what?”

She narrowed her eyes at the snap in his voice, “Look at the comments.”

Barry scrolled down to the end of the page where the comments were filled with people. “I hope he’s okay.” And another, “I’ve seen him get knocked before. He’ll be back.”

“This ones my favorite,” she leaned over the phone and scrolled through the comments before stopping at a comment with the picture of a teenage girl and a young boy.

“My brother’s hero has been the Flash since the first time he saved someone and when my brother heard the Flash had been hurt he cried but I told him it’s not about how hard a hero gets knocked down, it’s how he gets back up. I don’t know if you’re reading this Flash, but there’s an eight-year-old boy on the South Side who’s waiting for the Flash to show him what it means to never give up. God speed, Flash. And be careful.”

Iris took the phone back and put a hand on his knee. “I know it’s a lot, Bar. But you should know you have a lot of people rooting for you. Central City isn’t giving up on you just because you lost one fight. You shouldn’t either.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Call me if you need anything, promise?”

“Promise.”

When Iris left he sat staring at his suit, at what it had come to mean to him and to the people of Central City and while putting it on and putting himself in danger still terrified him to the core of who he was he realized he wasn’t going to be able to walk away.

He’d been lying to himself, thinking he could.

Pulling out his phone he called Caitlin and couldn’t help but smile and her cheerful greeting.

“Hey, so I have a question about this rehab. What do I need to do get my speed back?”

He could practically hear her smile over the line. “Well, Barry. I’m glad you asked.”


End file.
